Chapter 4: The Art of Meal Planning 77
and vegetables and add back a little water before heating to serve. Doing so
greatly reduces the sodium content. Purchase canned fruits that are canned
in their own juice or water (not syrup).
Focus on broth-based soups instead of cream-based soups. They are much
lower in calories and fat. Homemade soups are super easy to make yourself
and let you control the sodium and calories. You can put all the ingredients
in a crockpot before you leave the house in the morning and have soup ready
when you come home.
Frozen foods
We love frozen fruits and vegetables! They are a great go-to food for those
nights when you get in late and need to put a healthy supper on the table
quickly. Like canned vegetables, these frozen alternatives can be very
healthy. Avoid any that are breaded or have cream or cheese sauce on them.
A plethora of frozen dinners are on the market. Many of them claim to be
healthy, and some actually are. The trouble is that many are often too low
in calories and pasta heavy to be satisfying, sometimes having less than 200
calories and leaving you hungry later.
When checking the ingredients in a frozen meal, apply the same principles
to frozen dinners that we applied to your menu. Does it have protein, whole
grains, vegetables, fruit, a little fat (usually not a problem), and low-fat or
fat-free dairy? If you’re lucky, a typical frozen meal may have whole grains, a
dab of vegetables, and a little protein. You can always pump up the calories
and nutrition by adding a salad or another vegetable, a piece of fruit, and
30 minutes after the meal, a glass of milk. Look for meals that have 200 to
300 calories, less than 5 grams of saturated fat, less than 600 milligrams of
sodium, and more than 15 grams of protein.
Don’t forget to watch the sugar! Manufacturers sneak it into everything —
ketchup, spaghetti sauce, bread, salad dressings, peanut butter, and the list
goes on and on. You have to look at the ingredients and look for words that
indicate sugar, like dextrose, cane syrup, high fructose corn syrup, honey,
and so on. If one of these words appears in the first three ingredients, avoid
that food.
Understanding Nutrition Labels
We talk a lot about reading labels. They can be very confusing. Manufacturers
often design packaging so that you think you are getting a nutritious food,
when in fact, it’s full of sugar or sodium or the portion size is ridiculous.